Guy Woolfenden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since June 2006.

Guy Anthony Woolfenden OBE (born July 12, 1937) is an English composer and conductor. He was born in Ipswich and educated at Westminster Abbey Choir School, London, and Whitgift School, Croydon. He studied music at Christ's College in Cambridge and went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1961 and was Head of Music from 1963 to 1998. He was Artistic Director of the Cambridge Festival from 1986 to 1991.^[1] He is the founder of the publishing company, Ariel Music.

Woolfenden has composed many pieces for wind bands, chamber ensembles and orchestral works, many of which have been recorded. His conducting credits include three productions with Scottish Opera and, in London, the first British productions of Nielsen's Saul and David, Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans and Liszt's Don Sanche.

In collaboration with choreographer André Prokovsky, he has arranged the music for four full-length ballets, which he has subsequently conducted in productions with Australian Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Hong Kong Ballet Company, Scottish Ballet and Asami Maki Ballet, Tokyo. He conducted the acclaimed Russian premiere of Anna Karenina with The Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1993.

With around 150 scores for the Royal Shakespeare Company and an impressive list of credits with major European theatre companies, including the Comédie-Française, Paris, the Burgtheater, Vienna, the Teatro di Stabile, Genoa and the Norwegian National Theatre, Oslo, Guy Woolfenden's theatre music is highly regarded throughout the world. He has collaborated with some of the world's finest directors, designers and choreographers in many award-winning productions. His 1977 musical version of The Comedy of Errors won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.